Over on his blog, Soren Johnson (lead designer of Civilization IV) has a double post up on “8 Things Not To Design In A Game”.

He starts off with “designing for the hardcore crowd”, which means making the game hard for everyone else. His suggestion is to include difficulty levels as a way to make games more accessible to everyone.

A lot of games (in various genres) already do this, but perhaps not enough? I do know that some players have been complaining, for instance, that Bioshock is “too easy”. Doesn’t it have difficulty levels?

Another peeve is “too much stuff”, be it units in a strategy game or monsters in a shooter or weapons. “SuperMage, the game with 10 million spells!”. Most of which you’ll likely never use.

He also touches on the inanity of copy protection methods that force players to jump through hoops. We’ve already talked about that one, so I mention it in passing only.

The one that caught my eye was his last point: putting story in the wrong places. This, of course, is a controversial matter. He does have some right on his side, though.

I agree that games don’t need a lot of boring cut scenes, stereotypical NPCs, or idiotic dialogue. He may even be right that story has no place in strategy games.

But I think what he’s really complaining about is not really story, but poorly implemented story in games. Something that has been discussed here several times in the past.

Except for the story element, I’d have to agree with everything he says.

And the story point – well, he’s partially right. Modern storytelling in games is horrendous. They really interrupt the flow of the game (which is sometimes a good thing). And interfere with gameplay. I don’t think that’s entirely avoidable, but I think we could do much better.

Well, Coyote, you know what they say:
Those that can, do.
Those that can’t, teach.
Those that can do neither, complain.
Those that complain the most, become game reviewers and use zodiac names as their pen names.

Whenver I hear the part about not having a story in a game, I always think of the quote attributed to John Carmack, “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” I have to disagree with him on that point, it is important in a por…er, I mean it is important in a game. The article mentions strategy games, which usually aren’t my cup of tea, but the ones I have enjoyed recently are ones that do have a story. Command and Conquer 3 has video cutscenes between the missions and I found that gave me added incentive to complete the missions so I could view the story progression.

He really hits the nail on the head with the difficulty levels. I don’t know how many games I have thought were great at first, but the difficulty ramped up so fast that they became an exercise in frustration. I know of a couple console games that I completed everything except beating the final boss. Now I know the boss, especially the final one, is supposed to be the biggest, baddest, most challenging enemy in a game, but some I just found impossible. I think their should be some mechanism built into those games where if you have attempted the same task multiple times and failed it asks if you want it a little easier.

I know what you mean Wildwind, about those reviewers with Zodiac names. Aquarius’s reviews never held any water at all with me and Pisces opinions always sounded fishy.